Bill Brand

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en SOI pr po da bu WC CC sill Brand' - ITV's revolnary soap-opera of the ing heroes of Westminster Imped to the inconclusive of its first series last week.

further dollop of twentything weekly instalments is ised later this year. ut it is worth remarking on the cal adventures of its hero to Bill Brand Mr, is an inteligent lightly naive little lad from a ing-class family whose roots unk deep in one of the shire cotton towns - a tuency with a solid Labour ing Brand's naivete is no -ap - it stands him in good when he goes to university en takes a job as a lecturer.

ELECTED i we (through the eyes of the i of ITV's series, Trevor =hs) pick him up when he has een elected as Labour member ais home. town - in a ation - and is on his way to in town to add his vote to ir's very slender Parliamentary s at this point that the fur - gently at first, then with : and greater vigóur - to fly.

• you see, Billy Brand in his of hearts is really a socialist satever else the Parliamentary : Party is about (as Brand Ty but dramatically dis it is not socialism.

at it was all a terrible mis setting clected to the House heart strings visibly throbbing - on the verge of chucking it all in and going on the road with a progressive folk-group and their clinging harmonies.

But before that point the makers of 'Bill Brand' have painted on the screen a rich panoply of Parliamentary and Labour Party life, full of colour and incident.

VOTING

Scarcely has he arrived at Westminster than Brand finds himself voting against the Labour government over public spending cuts, only to be deserted by the Tribune group at the last moment and left to face a lone crucifixion at the hands of the Chief Whip.

Bloodied but unbowed he returns to be rescued from a rightwing motion of censure in his constituency party by manoeuvres worthy of the most rabid supporters of Prentice and Jenkins (you see, the left and the right are neither of them above a bit of hanky-panky with notice of meetings and so on!).

From then on its all go. He's offered a junior ministerial job by David Last (a slender alibi for Michael Foot), supports a factory occupation against sackings in his home town, punches a Tory on the nose in a scuffle after opposing an all-Party policy on the Prevention of Terrorism Act, tangles with the Catholic Church and assorted doctors over abortion, acts as errandboy for the left in the leadership struggle after the Wilson-figure succumbs to a beart-sitat. leads a - and generally mixes best of them.

There is also (as usual with Griffith's plays, and obligatory for a TV series at peak hours) an erotic sub-plot, in which the agonies and ecstacies of his political career are reflected.

Back at the Lancashire ranch young Billy is busy divorcing his up-tight middle class wife, while trying desperately to retain the misplaced affections of their two children.

This he does with the narrative assistance of a left-wing mistr who is simultaneously being recruited to gay liberation.

And as counterpoint to these delights there develops with his buxom, Tribunite, London landlady a most intricate and emotionally-charged relationship which always falls short, so to speak, of the horizontal.

But it wasn't what was in the series that gave it its content, but rather what was missing.

There were two 'characters' who never took on any form of tlesh and - blood - the Tories and the working class.

The fact that the Tories were always there merely as backdrop to the Westminster scenes gave it an unintended realism - without the series ever losing. its political "balance' it nonetheless reflected the fact that the great historical coalition of British politics runs right through the Labour Party, and that the most intricate and serious series is true. But the working class itself - whose strength and offensive battles are the cause of all the Parliamentary goings-on - never Bringing in the milk, palking Brand on the back for a left speech and so on.

REAL

At no point did Griffiths dare take his fragile 'hero' into the real crucible of British politics, beyond the narrow circle of fights and intrigues within the bureaucracy and into a struggle for political leadership among the mass of organised workers' strikes or occupations - though the plot gave him golden opportunities to do this.

It was a prudent decision of Mr Griffiths. Brand MP could not plausibly have done anything but evaporate in the leadership of a serious strike. And that would have been a bit of a let-down. -*Bill Brand' has been widely greeted as good political drama -for example by Tariq Ali in Red Weekly and a favourable notice in the WRP's Newsline.

ANTI-COMMUNIST

It is nothing of the sort. Like Griffiths' earlier plays - on, tor example, Gramsci and on Gerry Healy and the WRP - the political standpoint is that of sophisticated anti-communism.

Griffiths disclaims any explicit polițical position. The place of his central character is to ask questions, not provide answers. But Brand is incapable of anything but rhetorical questions.

The political moral of the series (and, no doubt, the reason why ITV have decided to finance it at such interminable length) may be discovered in the song that is sung softly in the offices of the Labour whips in the House of Commons: "Every moderate has 'lefts' Upon his back to bite him And every 'left' has further "lefts' And so on ad infinitum.' they clustered round Hume's deathbed, hoping that a moment of fevered weakness would give God his customary opportunity.

Yet for philosophy Hume's ideas were a sharp progressive jolt. Kant wrote that it was Hume who , *first interrupted my dogmatic șlumber' - and thrust him on to the critical philosophy' ', in which he tried to re-establish the foundations of reason, but at the same time drew out the contradictions of formal logic and showed the way to Hegel and Marx's developments of dialectics.

BASER

But in our own day Hume has been turned to baser uses. Alarmed by the power of materialism in the hands of the Marxists, modern bourgeois philosophers have brought back into fashion his scepticism regarding the material world, hoping to find "logical' boltholes for idealism.

Bertrand Russell, for example, once speculated (and only half in jest) that there is a peculiarly hot chamber in Hell reserved for those who have refuted Hume.

In real life, though, Hume was no anaemic modern sceptic. He himself pointed out that philosophical scepticism ran into conflict with all day-to-day practice and that consistent sceptics would "remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence."

Hume was born too early to resolve this contradiction between theory and practice. But even in death he kept his feet firmly on the ground.

When the doctors diagnosed (by poking his substantial abdomen) the tumour or swelling in my liver' that was finally to kill him, he wrote:

"This fact, not drawn by reasoning, but obvious to the senses, and perceived by the greatest Anatomist in Europe, must be admitted as unquestionable, and will alone account for my situation."

And he added:

"Even St. Thomas, the infidel

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T PRESS, Wednesday 25th August 1976

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